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whyiwriteinvim

Why do I creatively write in VIM?

I very specifically went and ensured the title of this mentioned creative writing because I do my coding in codium. I dont actually want to desanctify the thing I love about vim with plugins, and that's really the root of this whole piece. Vim is simple; it doesn't have distractions, and once you learn the tricks you become a very efficient writer. George RR martin Writes in a dos based text editor from decades ago. and I'd be willing to bet its for similar reasons. A distraction free workflow is super important to learning discipline in my opinion, it removes abstractions and forces intent into what you're doing rather than doing everything for you. A distraction free text editor can be defined by some of these traits.

What they dont do

What they should do

We live in a world where clippy never died; he just got turned into a textbox and never showed his face again. all the suggestion functions in tools like word or google docs or pages? THEY'RE FUCKING CLIPPY IN DISGUISE. These things do not actually help you, rather remove your agency in terms of ability to write in your own natural voice. Formatting and multimedia might be the only thing that these editors have as a serious advantage over a tool like vanilla vim or emacs, but multimedia in a document is distracting and can always be done after you use a real text processor to get the real work done. You an also abuse tools like pandoc with some simple markdown to achieve this same effect without ever faffing about with bloated editors.

Call me a software luddite, but I think we should all consider clinging to these lower level tools as a society; look outside, look at the people and the children. It's become a nightmare, instead of a symbiosis with technology many people have become slaves to it. They get fed bad information from distraction filled software that uses dark patterns in human psychology to trick them into maximizing the time wasting. In this world I see using vanilla vim as a symbol of resistance to the bullshit. I will not take your cookies. I will not install your app, and I sure as hell wont give you my information to make an account without a good fucking reason. As I write this i'm listening to "Man With a Mission" by Bad Religion. This is what I am, my mission is to free the human race from this toxic bullshit wasting server space.

Wont you join me friend?